Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Eggers
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American director Robert Eggers.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
In a world where people believe in something, then it does exist.
Witches were part of my imaginary childhood playground, so I wanted to make an archetypal fairytale about the mythic idea of what New England was to me as a kid.
The 'Friday the 13th' Jason movies were way too scary for me.
I remember seeing re-releases of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' and 'Bambi' in the theater very young. They had huge impacts on me, particularly the dark aspects.
The Wicked Witch of the West really scared me as a child.
Folk tales, fairy tales, religion, the occult - these are the things I'm most passionate about, even more than cinema. And I'm very passionate about cinema.
I still know the lyrics to pretty much any 'Mary Poppins' song.
Certainly in Catholic countries, the peasantry have always found ways to integrate pagan things in a way that makes it a little bit easier just to be a human being.
Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it's not obscure, and that's just fine.
My brother and I grew up in a setting in the woods very much like 'The Witch' in southern New Hampshire, and then we would drive up north to Maine to settings like 'The Lighthouse' for vacations.
When 'The Lighthouse,' bizarrely, became the film that people wanted to greenlight, it was really clear that those were the only two people to play the roles. And I knew that they would want to do it.
The Shining' is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.
What I love about research is when I'm having a bad day and I can't write, I'll just research some more, I'll learn some more and I'll have better command of the world of the film.
I grew up doing a lot of theater - acting and making sets and costumes.
I definitely hope to create, to tell some stories on larger canvases, which does mean making something that is narratively more broad. But that's not a bad thing.
Ben Wheatley continues to be one of the most original voices in contemporary film.
This makes me sound like some new age, crystal-worshipping weirdo, but the woods behind my house really felt haunted by the past when I was a kid.
I think I had my answers to the questions in 'The Witch,' and I had my answers to the questions in 'The Lighthouse;' I need those in order to write and direct them.
I am not trying to be one of those sadistic, Kubrickian directors who is trying to make these tensions any worse or exploit them, but... the camera sees what the camera sees.
Parajanov's love for the folk culture is quite infectious. The way that he loves everything on screen, I relate.
Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga' was huge for me. Seeing how all the creatures were made, looking inside Jabba The Hut, all of the maquettes lined up, building the world... 'This is a job?!' I was always avidly watching special features and behind the scenes stuff.
When we learned about Salem at school, the whole thing was confusing. Because the idea of the witch hunt is used as a symbol to describe people searching for something that's basically untrue, it cemented in my mind as a kid that witches weren't real.
Cinemascope has become synonymous with 'epic,' and absolutely if you're shooting armies and certain kinds of vast landscapes, you do want that panoramic canvas to work on. But if you look at art history there's not a whole lot of epic paintings that are in that aspect ratio.
The more you try to turn away from darkness, the more darkness is right against your back.
There's a lot of cool stuff going on in independent film. But obviously, yeah - all the comic-book-franchise stuff is deeply boring. But these comic-book characters are the pagan pantheon of gods in today's contemporary culture. It's so important to so many people.
You can't train a goat. You can't. You can't. So I don't recommend making a movie with a goat in a major role to anyone.
Basically, I was always disappointed that the witches weren't real when we learned about the Salem witch trials.
I wrote a lot of scripts that were dark and fairy tale-like, but too strange.
You've got to love a movie where a witch is your nanny.
We grew up on Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett. You're making something about men on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you're going to look to those guys.
I actually like 'The Shining' more than I like Kubrick, I think. The tension he sustains through the whole film is so great.
I went to Salem as many Halloweens as I possibly could.
I don't want to act like the witch trials all over New England were warranted, but when you live in a culture that believes something is real, it feels very real.
My office is just overflowing with books about witches and books about 17th-century animal husbandry and agricultural farm tools from the period.
Witches were really scary to me as a kid.
Look, some days, you have to film a sequence in which the rain is pounding down on someone and you're just turning the camera on what's happening. And other days, you occasionally have to spray Robert Pattinson in the face with a firehose.
I was totally shocked when Willem Dafoe's manager said that he wanted to have lunch with me.
As a kid, picturing people who grew up in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I walking around in hose and latched shoes in the woods behind my house was an interesting atmospheric thing for me.
For better or for worse, my brother and I both have some Jungian leanings, so we're tempted to think that these bits and bobs of the past are knocking around in everyone's heads somehow to some degree, and they just need to be jiggled into the front of their head in the mind again.
Three years into getting 'The Witch' financed, I was hanging out with my brother and he was like, 'I'm working on this script. It's a ghost story in a lighthouse.' I thought, 'Damn, that's a really good idea, I wish I'd had it.'
I had these fashion history books that I really enjoyed looking at. I liked costumes and used to wear them to school until I got beat up for it.
For some reason, no one wanted to give me money to make a movie written in early modern English that involved a lot of puritans praying - even if it did involve a witch.
I've talked about this a lot, but 'The Witch' took four years to finance because there were certain compromises I wouldn't make.
Guillermo del Toro is able to invent his worlds. I would find the pressure of having to invent crippling.
I don't like twists. I don't get much out of them. If you know two cars are about to run into each other, you don't walk away and say, 'Oh, I know what's going to happen.' You watch.
For me, rehearsal is only about blocking and pacing; it's not about performance.
Basically, I had a hard time getting anyone to want to make any of the features that I had written.
I would definitely agree that 'The Witch' doesn't leave much of anything to the imagination. There are some ambiguities about 'The Witch,' for sure, but all in all, it's pretty clear what's going on.
To be honest with you, the forest resonates with me more, like instinctually, than the sea does.
Murnau is neck to neck with Bergman as my favorite director. He's responsible for some of the best images in cinema of all time, from 'Nosferatu' to 'Faust' to 'Sunset.'
I certainly grew up in coastal New Hampshire, but I prefer to play in the woods than go to Hampton Beach or whatever.
The Diary of Samuel Sewall,' 'The Diary of John Winthrop,' these are easy for anyone to get their hands on. This was really common stuff and there's tons of cases of demon possession.
Conan the Barbarian,' 'Star Wars,' 'Mary Poppins' and 'The Wizard of Oz' were my earliest VHS obsessions.
I mean, obviously it's exciting for me to see what 'The Revenant' is doing in the box office. That's very exciting.
The Witch' was very well planned, but 'The Lighthouse' was so much more so.
What's important to me about horror stories is to look at what's actually horrifying about humanity, instead of shining a flashlight on it and running away giggling.
Bergman's my favorite filmmaker, if I had to choose.
African Queen' is pretty darn great.
After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make.
I like finding things that are on the fringes and sort of half-forgotten, and to remind us of those things.
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